Victor Hugo is best known for his novels Les MIserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though it’s probably more accurate to say that he is best known for going off on extremely long tangents in said novels. Such as the infamous twenty six pages about the Paris sewer system. Though really, the eighteen chapters […]
After vanishing for a bit into the world of working strange hours and taking classes, I am back with a discussion of discoveries hiding in plain sight. That almost seems topical! There have been plenty of scientific discoveries that occurred, essentially, because someone decided to actually look. So let’s look at some recent and not […]
One of the reasons I started this blog was to show the lighter side of science. Usually, this means the silly side. But since Valentine’s Day is on Wednesday, today we’re looking at the romantic side. And I probably won’t even make more than one “great chemistry” joke, which is more than we can say […]
When you look at a list of animals by their common names, it will generally start with aardvark and ends with zebra (or zorse…). But when it comes to scientific names, the extremes of the alphabet get a little more extreme. And at least in a few cases, their positioning in alphabetical list is quite […]
Welcome to the new Saturday posting schedule! In honour of that, today we’re talking about… spite! Spite is an amazing thing. It’s actually the reason that Diane Duane started writing for Star Trek, which is simply fantastic. It’s also one of many ways to pick a name for a species. You’re not supposed to pick […]
As a Terry Pratchett fan, I love a good footnote. Scientific footnotes are generally fairly dry things. However, every now and then you get a footnote that is in fact hilarious. I’ve already shared my favourite, which I love for its pure “Reviewer 3 made me do it” honesty. But there are several other great […]
There are a lot of living things on the planet. This is probably pretty obvious, but the important part here is that it means they have to name a lot of species. I’ve discussed some of the science fiction and fantasy references in species names before. And of course, I’ve advocated for a strong liberal […]
The Ig Nobel prizes were announced last night. Which was hilariously good timing seeing as yesterday I idly wondered if they’d been announced yet for this year. Sadly I didn’t get to actually watch the webcast live due to choir practice, but all the same it’s basically a gift wrapped post for this blog. So […]
When a new species is discovered, there are a lot of options for naming it. As long as you don’t name it after yourself, you can basically do what you want. A significant physical characteristic. The place you discovered it. An important mentor. Or, well, we saw from fruit fly gene names that scientists are […]
The popular image of science involves a lot of high tech tools. The reality is, much like any job, you end up using some utterly mundane things. Often while fixing the high tech ones. While the Maguyveresque electronics shop manager at my grad school probably didn’t really use bubblegum and a paperclip to repair NMR […]